Saturday, August 13, 2011

Tor the Treasure Finder

Tor has been trolling the newly dry stream bed that goes through town down from our house for cottonwood seedlings. He always finds other cool stuff, like old ice-skates, amazing rocks and curious-looking bottles. He found one this afternoon that was particularly odd; sort of like a large baby food bottle with a built-in well. I thought is looked noteworthy, so we washed it up and found on the bottom a patent number with no name or brand.
Enter the power of the web.
We googled the patent number and came up with this webpage. Our little bottle was about halfway down the page:

From the author's site:

The Ink Market Was Once Competitive
Mr. Owen E. Raab's Patented Ink Bottle (No. 1,759,866)
It Makes it Easy to Fill Your PenClick here if you want to learn how to get Patent Drawings

Society is indebted to Mr. Owen E. Raab of Seattle, Washington for the invention of a "significant improvement in combined wells and bottles". His Patent No. 1,759,866 was granted on May 27, 1930 and signalled the demise of the penwiper industry.

Anyhow, a fun little find; the boy has the treasure-finding gift. Perhaps he got it from his genetic link to Hyrum and his brother Joseph...